


Sleep When We're Dead

by Nemonus



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 09:49:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7310116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cayde-6 is duty-bound to the Vanguard due in part to the memory of his mentor, Andal. When a phantom Toland the Shattered bargains for Cayde's help to find records thought lost, Toland knows just what leverage to offer.</p><p>"Don't you want to know what happened to Andal?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleep When We're Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the same timeline as "Darkness Takes The Last."

_“I am shocked and surprised and interested in meeting death.”_

Richard Bach

“You’re haunting the wrong person tonight, spirit.”  
  
“Eris does not want to see me.”  
  
“Why? No, wait, the answer is obvious. You wanna get out of my room?”  
  
Toland didn’t take the hint.  
  
Even while charging, Cayde-6’s processes stayed sharp. He had to pop a cord out of his shoulder and rearrange the cloak and snaps around the connection, but he remembered every hour preceding as he stood up and raised his visual filters. The light had moved around through the crack in the door as the sun went down. Cayde-6 charged sporadically, but today his schedule was going to match the diurnal cycle for at least a few hours.  And he had been…comfortable, maybe: besieged by memory, sure, allowing his own starvation from it, overclocking with worry as he went over the Hunter rosters in his head, but comfortable, blast it, this was what nights _were_.  
  
What was left of Toland the Shattered - not unknown in the Tower, but rare, dropping visitations and missives full of petty, needy rage, a Crota-Shadow to Crota’s Bane - had chosen a full-dark hour.  
  
Toland said, “Do you want to know what happened to Andal?”  
  
Exos didn’t sleep. Even if Cayde was human, he thought, he wouldn’t sleep much. He would be just this tired, maybe, have a dashing five-o-clock shadow and less dashing bruises under his eyes, but he’d see this hour through.  
  
Toland the Shattered didn’t sleep. Toland the Shattered was dead.  
  
Eris Morn, Cayde-6 thought vehemently, slept.  
  
Cayde stood up, the end of the charger slamming onto the concrete. “Nothing happened to Andal. He died. Same thing as happens to everybody.”  
  
The form that currently housed Toland the Shattered was a vague darkness: here a thin forearm, here the edge of a Warlock’s cloak scuttling, here the chitinous horns of the Ram or scarab-bright Hive eyes. He wasn’t transparent, although part of Cayde’s mind kept insisting that the foggy, shadowy symbols he received could be interpreted as transparency. A smell like ozone, like deep dust, set Cayde on edge. His Ghost’s eyelight flickered.  
  
One could get used to anything.  
  
“What do you want?” Cayde had a pistol in most of his go-bags. He grabbed for the thick leather mouth of the nearest.  
  
_Andal._  
  
Maybe his processes were running slow, because the feeling was finally catching up to his words. Andal had gone and fought Taniks the Scarred and _lost_ , just been out-hunted or out-moved or out-thought, and had left Cayde with a cloak and grief and a blasted _throne_. No seats at the Vanguard table, no, but the pressure was there, gilded in gold and drank from wineglasses and the terrified smiles of green Guardians, pushing at Cayde like a weight.  
  
And Toland decided to visit.  
  
The ghostly silhouette raised a hand that merged with its own coattails for half a second, flicking like a tattered curtain as it gestured. “Before his mundane, colorful death, Andal kept records. Good Hunter records, mapping the area where the Fallen roamed. He saw the first incursions the Hive drove into the Earth. I wish to recover his maps.”  
  
“Taniks would have taken them, and Taniks roamed far from here, Warlock.”  
  
“Oh, did I not mention that?” Toland tipped his head. “That’s where we’re going.”  
  
“We?” Cayde felt comfortable enough to look away while he picked up the pistol.  
  
“Andal was a good Vanguard, and encrypted his notes instead of burying them.”  
  
“Now wait a minute.” Cayde straightened and holstered the gun. A quick systems check told him that he had been running slow for three hours 12 minutes, and had returned to the best efficiency his hardware could manage in the midnight cold. “Physical formats are highly secure -”  
  
“Yes, to protect against the Fallen.”  
  
Maybe the initial, territorial response had been right. Maybe Toland did need to get out of his room. “So what’s stopping me from kicking you out and remembering my friend in peace?”  
  
“You have the key.”  
  
Now it was Cayde’s turn to wait, flexing his fingers around the gun, and tip his head. “And what key is that?”  
  
“Andal coded some of his records to be only accessible to his most trusted myrmidon, or to the Hunter Vanguard. Conveniently … or perhaps inconveniently … the universe folded together such that both of those people are you.”  
  
“He left me something.”  
  
“He left you something very valuable.”  
  
Cayde’s hand tightened around the gun, then let go. He might need to fly somewhere. He might need - need, definitely -  
  
No. Cayde was aware of his own denial.  
  
He might want to leave the Tower. Duty had kept him here before, but it was midnight. No one would expect him anywhere else. Ikora and Zavala - well, he’d tell them. But they didn’t need to know _first_.  
  
Cayde said, “So Taniks killed him, and the Guardian killed Taniks. Could have had a cache somewhere.”  
  
Toland flickered. Maybe it was a nod, or maybe a glitch in perception so that one Hive eye grew momentarily from the dark fog where his jaw should have been. “Most of what’s left of the House of Wolves spend their time in the Cosmodrome, hassling jumpship reclamation convoys, but anything Taniks had coveted would be where he was defeated last - on the moon. The ship went down in the Ocean of Storms after the Guardians cleared it out.”  
  
“Okay.” Cayde checked his systems again, one more deep look to make sure everything was in order. Whenever he made these quick exits, it always was. “And you said you knew something about when he died.”  
  
“I did.”  
  
Andal’s cloak still hung over Cayde’s shoulder. Andal had been talkative, imaginative - too smart for his own good sometimes, fond of pranks and bets, and he’d sewn nearly every stitch of that cloak himself and then named it _grief-bringer_ and took that doomed name on because he was a Light-cursed gambler, and Cayde had been more loyal to him for it.  
  
“Ain’t you going to tell me?”  
  
“When we arrive at the locus of the conflict.”  
  
“You weren’t there yourself. How do you know what happened to Andal?” If they went, they would not be going to Andal’s grave. He had died on Earth, in a dead-end canyon, while Taniks was a mercenary not yet flying the Wolf pack banner. Cayde had visited that place alive and dead. This would be a trip to his murderer’s treasure-cache.  
  
“I see things.”  
  
“Don’t give me this cryptic crap. If you were there you could have helped him, and I’m a real charitable guy when it comes to some things but _leaving people to die_ isn’t one of them —”  
  
Toland’s voice lowered. “The Vanguard takes care of itself, does it not?”  
  
Cayde hit him. His open hand plunged into the fog, glanced off an arm, and emerged at 20 percent efficiency and with a highly anomalous temperature warning. Toland’s only response was a liquid flicker, half sight and half sound, intrusively timpanic.  The Hive eat those worms found in the dust in the Dreadnaught, Cayde thought, unbidden.  
  
It was both creepy and dissatisfying, and Cayde cocked his arm back either to retreat or to hit him again. Couldn’t quite tell. Possibilities hadn’t quite worked themselves out yet. They never really did, and Cayde had made comfortable peace with that.  
  
“I am not without empathy.” Toland said loudly. Cayde looked around, as if he could see green Hunter dormers rousing through the walls. The edges of Toland’s silhouette slithered. It raised a hand in which Cayde saw the outline of a gun less substantial than the rest of the form - the faint white outline of spines. “The City will also benefit from a direct strike at Wolfship Kaliks-Syn. The eyes of the Vanguard are sharp. Are they not?”  
  
Cayde said, “This is the deal. You get the information you want, I get what’s left of Andal. I keep the message, got it?”  
  
A nod.  
  
“You’re wondering why I never went and got it before.”  
  
“The ship is … partially … intact. Even the Guardian did not know its location. I know the moon.”  
  
Cayde said, “I know where Amanda keeps her ship.”  
  
 

* * *

  
  
Ocean of Storms was open and blue, daylight flooding the mare. Cayde had put Amanda’s jumpy little shuttle down, flirting with the edge of a crater but landing on solid ground. They had landed within sight of the wreckage of the Kaliks-Syn, because without mountains or foliage in the way there was no route to avoid it and little value in temporary secrecy.  
  
The Guardian who had killed Taniks - who had taken Cayde’s vengeance from him, and that felt like a blown fuse and a kick in the eyes, but that was _over_ \- hadn’t brought the ship down. Not intentionally. Instead, Cayde suspected from the telling of the tale, that it had been a matter of attrition. Many things were. The Guardian had faced down Taniks’ small army inside the ship and bled it so dry of crew that it lurched off desperately until it couldn’t keep itself in the sky any more.  
  
It came down in two red pieces, now cracked open near the middle. Vandals skulked in and out of the shadows at the entrance.  
  
“That’s called _rapid unscheduled disassembly_ ,” Cayde said.  
  
"The Guardians are not inconsequential.” Toland said, curt, the unevenness of his voice letting the last syllables fall away as if he couldn’t quite sustain the tone.  
  
“Yeah, well, you’re welcome.” Cayde took his gun in hand again and looked at the wide gray horizon. “You know how long I’ve wanted to go out here? When we go back, I’m writing this up. I’m documenting my own blasted walkabout because it’s what Andal would have wanted.”  
  
“There are Fallen in our way.”  
  
“I know. And the Fallen know us. They have plans for how to deal with Guardians who won’t die, even if those plans don’t work very well. Even if there are two of us.”  
  
“Then we manipulate those plans. You will die. They will be drawn to your Ghost. I will distract them. You will revive at the edge of the ship and slip inside.”  
  
Cayde shook his head, then readjusted his hood around the metal spike jutting out from his forehead. Seemed complicated, and he was itching to put a bullet between something’s eyes. He would have to be ready for scraping sounds as his own joints loosened - not a lot of exercise in the Tower, not a lot of time to practice. Cayde-6 made time, though. Charging did not take eight hours. “Aright,” he said, not meaning it. “Where are you going?”  
  
“To watch.” Toland raised the ghost of Bad Juju as if in indication of his own incorporeality.  
  
“You can still hit things,” Cayde started, then changed his mind about arguing it. “You know, I don’t really care.” The long walk to the Fallen ship was right there, caked with moon dust the kind Guardians had fought over for endless lifetimes, and he had more ammunition in the go-bag. Toland hummed, the tone somber and disappointed, as he faded. Cayde strode straight toward the ship.  
  
He stealthed halfway there, saw the Fallen’s heads lift in both surprise and recognition. They would expect him to juke around.  
  
Instead, he fired at the nearest and moved on from there. They came at him in a pack, shock rifle bullets splashing short. He judged right, hit three more in quick bursts of chittering screams and the hiss of the bullets. The Wolf banners waved, deflated, from under the bodies. For four steps he walked alone, then jumped over a hail of fire and came down between two more Fallen. Practice had paid off. He skidded to the doorway and put his back to the ship, just in case there was something else out there along the bodies. He had seen more, hadn’t he? There had been more -  
  
A brown-scaled hand, attached to an arm as thick as his and longer, reached around the broken hatch and gripped it an inch from his face.  
  
Cayde raised the pistol vertically in front of his own eyes. His left knee had just started to bend, hydraulics pressurizing to take him away from the Captain, when she fired the scorch cannon she held in her two lower arms. The two of them were far too close; the explosion must have knocked her back too, but she kept coming while Cayde fired two more shots into her burning chest.  
  
He would need to reload soon, and planned for it. He backpedaled, keeping the Fallen’s head down and the wall of the ship still mostly between them.  
  
She had been counting shots too, though. She was very smart or very lucky. When Cayde hesitated she lunged forward. He expected that insanely short-range attack again, but somehow she’d dodged so quickly that the scorch cannon shots intentionally sprayed wide, passing him, one of them splashing against the wall behind him.  
  
The Fallen followed them in and smacked her helmeted forehead against his face.  
  
He fell to one knee, the casing of his jaw cracked but the rods beneath still holding. The Fallen reared, the scorch cannon practically teetering in one of her hands. He was pretty certain the next blow hit his face again, because one of the cameras went out and another spiderwebbed. The Fallen roared.  
  
Cayde-6 didn’t die easy.  
  
the **tower** _stands_ on _a_ **black** _plain_  
  
_you see the army. you have to look at their faces, because that is part of the deal. the soldiers of the army on the black plain have made a bet with you, have placed the cards face down, and the queen of spades has maggots coming out of her cheeks and oh Light you’ve lost_ that game _, the most important, most cherished one, and you’ve wagered_ that one _of your prized possessions, and so you have to look at their faces, because that is part of the deal_  
  
He pulled a knife with three holes punched through it and a blade polished almost down to the molecular level. With a kick of energy he charged it with Void and slashed, feeling the resistance of the Fallen’s bones like walking against a high wind. Two of the Fallen’s arms dropped off, scorched and frozen, the smell of ozone kicking back into Cayde’s receptors. She surged forward, half to attack and half in shock, and Cayde flipped the knife around and jammed it into the Captain’s throat until his knuckles pressed into the leathery neck.  
  
The wash of the Arc blade hit two more Fallen who had been lurking in the broken doorway, and then the mare was silent again, Cayde’s radar pinging empty and his temperature just a little bit up as his Ghost started to work on him.  
  
_Light._ He whooped. He had missed this.  
  
Earth was rising above him, dark and clouded.    
  
Cayde folded the knife away.

 

* * *

  
  
It had been such a long time since Toland had been on the moon last. There had been concerns last time, but when had there not been? That was a Guardian-led mission and bright Eriana, well, she _tried her best_ , but she had fought in such the wrong direction.  
  
This time Toland was on the right track - was at least dissecting the body of the right creature, even if there was little hope of bringing it back to life.  
  
He watched Cayde amble along the side of the ship and stop at a crumbled segment of metal that ascended like an uneven stairway. Toland hunched in a fold of metal, one arm over the place where his eyes should have stayed, his right foot tapping. Cayde, roaming Vanguard, his wants so easy to read, his import all tied up in one footstep outside the Tower. _Boring, Cayde_ , Toland muttered into the crook of his own arm, which he had drawn up over himself because it was also the universe, and therefore belonged there.  
  
“I’m done,” Cayde said loudly, without giving any indication of having heard him. “You coming with me?”  
  
Toland uncurled. Pieces of his shadow-essence had adhered to the metal. “I didn’t feel you _die_ , Vanguard. You have broken the covenant.”  
  
“Do you mean that I _changed_ the _plan_?” Cayde made air quotes.  
  
“Eris would not have charged ahead into this fool scheme the way you have, Vanguard!”  
  
“I seem to recall that this is your scheme. And that I’m glad I’m not Eris, not to mention the … “ He made a sketchy, jagged gesture around his eyes. “And the fact that she bothers with you.”  
  
Toland answered with only a huff. Eris was still curled warm in her bed now, probably: her thoughts gently circled, green-black muck as soft as moss.  
  
Cayde tromped forward into Taniks’ lair, proving his own point. By rule-by-rule, he had claimed it; mechanical meritocracy beating time on his own killer’s grave, thump thump thump of _Andal my heart, Andal my compass - Rot it, Eris_. Toland drew his focus up away from Cayde's thoughts like an anchor from the sea, reclaiming his own. _Wait for me, Eris._  
  
He followed Cayde into the Fallen ship  
  
“You know what your problem is?” Cayde said. “ _Your_ bad ideas never work.”

“The logic of the sword might say the same.”  
  
The Fallen at the door hadn’t been gate-guards. Instead, they had probably been scavengers, poring over a battle that was already last generation’s history in their quick, ever-changing faction wars. The Queen of the shoals had been foolish to ally with such a skittish species.  
  
The tunnels were wide enough for three, but broken; a cavernous entranceway made of blue steel had collapsed, and from there on in they picked their way through piles of jagged metal.  
  
Cayde’s lights, eye and mouth, were the brightest points in the hallway. It didn’t matter at all to Toland, wouldn’t even have three years ago, to be unable to see. The Darkness on the moon was pervasive, sunk into the dirt; he was expert at looking for the dead in tunnels, and there was a record of death here that settled like phlegm in his throat. Cayde’s Void-sense, still sparking from the wealth of power he had both expended and generated in his attack on the Captain, quested out strong. This, Toland had known, was a trait of the Vanguard. The Light needed to come to them easily in order to secure their position, and after their instatement it met them even easier. A hand was reached out toward the Vanguard from the Speaker, from the dead Traveler, from something, and it had - it had interfered with Toland’s plan at the door.  
  
Cayde was sussing out Andal.  
  
“He was here,” Cayde said, his volume low, his eye lights flickering. “Not here, but his influence. Might not ever have physically set foot in the place. I wonder if the Guardian felt it. No reason to. They didn’t know…”  
  
“All the phantasms in the tunnels … ”  
  
Cayde seemed taken aback. “Stop agreeing with me. It’s creepy.”  
  
“Hmm.”  
  
“He was always so … didn’t bother doing something unless he’d bother to do it twice. He’d send people clues to mysteries he invented, trails for young Guardians to follow. That’s how we met, really. He set puzzles. I was good at solving them. Cut right through them sometimes, instead of doing them the way he had thought up.”  
  
Cayde hesitated between words, reminiscence drawn tightly around him like the tattered cloak, and Toland felt the air thicken with it. In a Hive fortress that emotion might have been absorbed by the walls, turned in by them, transcribed into notes and chords. In the wolfship it simply sat, flat and stale emotion, and Cayde’s metallic footfalls.  
  
“He was there when I was exiled,” Toland said.  
  
Cayde didn't turn around. “I know. He didn’t stand for weirdness. Not when it had to do with the Hive. Can’t be much you could tell me about him that I don’t know.”  
  
Distracted, Cayde did not see the Captain that dropped from the ceiling until its knife was in his chest, sparking. Cayde shouted and raised his gun, but again the knife was pulled out and driven in. Cayde turned to recover, but Toland was there.  
  
Certainly he had sensed them, certainly he could have spoken to them at the distance that they were. They could hardly see Toland's shadow-form, and were wary of it.  
  
Cayde, though, had gone against the plan, and Toland would exert no great effort to prevent a repeat of it.  
  
Cayde recoiled, and five more Fallen dropped from the ceiling, falling over one another in their closeness. The metal grate they had dislodged struck Cayde and bounced off, falling through several layers of Toland's temporary body and slamming down on his left foot. The world became a swarming, shouting mess of Fallen, threatening to override even Toland’s senses with their buzzing darkness. The Vanguard’s Ghost flared immediately, its pieces floating as it created the field that would revive him, but after Toland found the right resonance, he slotted into the swarm of death and Darkness like a gear in a machine.  
  
The Fallen themselves were not of the Darkness. Born on a far-away world and chased, they were pirate-refugees by necessity and desperation. They were not inherently Dark.  
  
The moon, though, had belonged the Hive since times that made Toland smile with the memory of them.  
  
He reached for the nearest Wizard’s altar.  
  
He caught a hold of Cayde’s soul before the Ghost could. The Light flared, bursts like tears or angry supernovae, solar-system scale and tiny at once. This was the pique of the Ghost. Cayde would not like this.  
  
Regardless, Cayde was dying. Death was the wide open land, the chorus, the taste of the universe, and Toland thrived in it.

* * *

  
  
the **tower** _stands_ on _a_ **black** _plain_  
  
The resurrection was fast, and at first Cayde thought something had gone wrong.  
  
His Ghost had not yet closed its flanges together, and he thought that maybe he could move the entire ship easier than he could move his own body. He could just shift the wall and lift it, if he wanted to, except he didn’t want to. Instead, he was content to just stand here, comfortable like after a long charge, and know calmly and rationally that he could move that wall with his mind if he wanted to. His body was askew on the ground.  
  
Then, Cayde felt the world come back. He was properly resurrected this time, his hands coming up to protect himself from the scrum of Fallen he had just been buried in. When nothing immediately attacked he turned to his Ghost, drinking in the sight of the familiar machine, the health evident in its unmarked white facets —  
  
Except there was green light too. The half-visible figure of Toland still held the glowing, rippling sphere of light between black fingers that bled smoke toward the ceiling. It was empty, Cayde thought, nonsensically, of the green sphere. Something was missing.  
  
The green energy almost disappeared before it exploded, casting the hallway in lightning, frying the Fallen’s armor and skin so that the smell of its burning followed the energy out in an uneven cloud.    
  
the **tower** _stands_ on _a_ **black** _plain_  
  
For the third time, Cayde felt himself resurrect.  
  
The hallway was empty, the Fallen dead and staying dead, something creaking in another part of the ship. The green light had burned itself out.  
  
Cayde stalked toward him. “What did you do?”  
  
“There are only so many ways I can affect the mortal plane!” Toland shouted, unexpectedly tense, unexpectedly loud for a voice that did not echo. “Do you think this is easy, tying an incorporeal form to the mortal plane like a bauble on a string? My presence here is a jewel, a concentrated, pressurized matrix of my own _insistence_ on it, and —”  
  
Cayde interrupted before Toland had said concentrated. “I saw you hold that green light, before I came back. I wasn't in the usual place! And that -”  
  
Toland softened his voice, focused, and forced Cayde into silence with it. “We are surrounded by the locus of Hive magic, their breeding-ground, their larder." He flinched with want and anger. “I could have done _worse_.”  
  
For a moment, Cayde’s shoulders heaved as if his fury gave him muscle and bone.  
  
The Vanguard composed himself. Methodically checked to make sure his gun and his cloak were intact. “What was that glowing thing?”  
  
“Just the disposable casing on the outside of your soul.”  
  
“Not good enough.” Cayde folded his arms and gave Toland the Shattered his best ‘green Guardian has done something stupid’ sideways stare.  
  
The Warlock ruffled, clouds of darkness rolling over the top of his vague helmet. “The moment of a Guardian’s detonation is a paracausal impossibility. The Traveler reaches toward you and you toward it, the Light flowing back and forth, allowing the Ghost to do its delicate work of reconstituting your fragile skull-and-bones. I simply gave that energy access to a slight detour. Feed it through the magics I learned from the Deathsinger, and it becomes a knot of paracausal potential. Released, yours goes back to you, since building your Light back up from disparate parts is the one task for which your Ghost was built and the one task at which it does best. I used it for a more destructive purpose, and then returned it to you.”  
  
“Get your grubby hands off my, ah, soul? Don’t do it again.”  
  
“I never touched it.”  
  
“You said Eris has one like that. Is she - is she siphoning energy from the Guardians around that rock? No one _dies_ in the Tower unless they jump.”  
  
“It is her own.” Toland raised his own hands as if to cup the rock Eris held.  
  
“Light, that’s grim.”  
  
Some muscular onyx facet in the mess of coil and shadow shrugged. “Matter cannot be created or destroyed. So it is with the quiddity of death, which the Guardians embody.”  
  
Cayde nudged a Fallen’s arm with the tip of his boot. “It worked. Do not do it again.”  
  
He didn’t have to. The Fallen had stripped anything they had wanted from the wolfship. It became more obvious as they progressed that one group had been guarding the burgeoning colony formed by the other, a tense, miniature alliance between Wolves. The Fallen had made beds in the remains of the ship, where the atmosphere still smelled like metal and where, probably, they could more easily fight off any Hive that might move against them. There was even an alter made to look like a Servitor, dead wires twined into a circle taller than Cayde.  
  
There were the marks of Taniks too, the few Eliksni letters that Cayde had taught himself to read. Although Taniks had been known for keeping trophies, his ship was no more crowded than any Fallen ketch. Maybe there were treasuries somewhere, but their contents had not spilled in the crash. There was a cache, though, that included broken and browned pieces of Ghosts. The Fallen had put the artifacts of their Guardian enemies together, and left them in an unlocked treasure box in a room that might have been an armory, or even a section of hallway. It was ruined enough that they could see stars through a rip in the ceiling. A tank had crashed one room over, its legs twisted and its insectile eyes burned out.  
  
There, behind a generator pod that had been standing when the ship ran and was still standing now, they found the box.  
  
There were gloves inside, as well as the pieces of Ghosts wrapped in cloth to keep them carefully contained from one another and from their broken pieces of themselves, and an engram. When Cayde touched it it decoded, a shower of blue sparks revealing a letter written on paper, the way Cayde liked his maps and Andal had always liked his.  
  
Cayde snatched it, waited for traps, found none. Remembered the other reason he had come here. He had never forgotten it, really, but the memory routines kicked in and there it was, tagged with emotion going back decades, each timestamp its own feedback loop until the memory-emotions compounded and threatened to overheat him.  
   
He kept the letter in his hand while he turned to look at Toland.  
  
The spirit sighed. “Ah, the petty secrets of the fabled Tower.”  
  
“You told me you knew something about Andal.”  
  
“He died,” Toland muttered. “Same. As. Anybody.”  
  
Cayde waited for a beat. Waited for some suggestion of a trick that was more than trickery. Cayde knew riddles - Andal had taught him well enough. Toland was not being clever with him. Just ornery.  
  
But Cayde had also already looked at the letter, so he has his weapon ready: a death for a death, then. Cayde held up the letter. “It’s a shopping list.”  
  
Toland reeled back. “What new pettiness is this? Back from me, back away. We did not cross both packs and several deaths for this.”  
  
“An inventory.” Cayde tapped the backs of his fingers against the paper. _I’m so sorry, Andal. I’m sorry about what I saw on the black plain._ He sent a silent apology to Ikora and Zavala, too. “He gave himself a bunch of tasks to do after he finished off Taniks. Nothing special.” He tipped the paper so that Toland could see the bulleted list.  
  
“There were Hive screams that told me of the fight that shook the system, the death of the Vanguard - ”  
  
“Guess they screamed wrong.” Cayde folded the paper carefully, end over end. He knew he was good at convincing people that he treated everything casual. “You said we didn’t come here for this. For what? Looks like neither of us got what we wanted, so no net loss, really.”  
  
“The law of conflict thrives on those who win and those who die. You scavenge words like the Fallen -”  
  
“Was never too good at dying proper.”  
  
Toland, Cayde thought, just about imploded. Whipped the murky atmosphere of the Fallen and of the moon around him like a cloak and buried into it, the black murk of him disappearing into its own center.  
  
Alone, Cayde turned the message over and over in his hands. It was written in a very, very familiar substitution cipher, so familiar to Cayde that he almost assumed that anyone could read it. Of course, anyone had been Andal’s protege and provocateur, anyone would know the Vanguard’s bet. It’s easy, he thought, and sat down on a stair with one arm hooked over the railing, and rubbed his shoulder. Anyone could see that it explained the Wolves’ troop movements, as had been accurate in Andal’s time. And there at the bottom, a bit about the Hive: the Wizards are digging.  
  
It was far too late for information like that to be useful now. Andal hadn’t known Crota’s name, not to mention Oryx’s or all the things that would befall the galaxy after his time. The ketch was very still, not even creaking. Cayde looked at the stars.  
  
Maybe, just maybe, he would tell the part of the letter about the Hive to Eris. See if he could add ’irony’ to the list of things she didn’t find funny.


End file.
